Hello everyone, I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

As you may have heard, the United Nations Big Climate Summit, COP 30, is happening right now in Brazil.

But one country is notably absent. That would be us, the United States.

The White House chose not to send any senior officials this year.

So we wanted to check in on COP 30 as the negotiations are wrapping up and also check in on the status of the global fight against climate change.

So here to make us smart about this is Jennifer Haverkamp.

She's a professor at Michigan Law School and recently retired director at the UM Graham Sustainability

Institute.

And she previously served as a special representative for environment and water resources in

the U.S. Department of State.

Welcome to the show, Jennifer.

Thank you very much.

Now, first we should note that there is news that just came out about a fire that broke out at the venue,

and much of the conference was evacuated.

That's a developing story.

We don't have too much info yet, but the Brazilian government has said that there were no injuries.

How do you think something like this is going to affect the rest of COP 30? Well, when the cop is in its final days,

the pace has intensified greatly and there's a sense of every minute counts. And so I would suspect

if they're evacuated for several hours, it will be a bit of a

setback. And they may slop over farther into the weekend than they would otherwise.

You've successfully led climate negotiations in the past. What from your experience does it really

take to get countries to come to agreement on these issues?

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